Tuesday, February 23, 2010

As the country struggled to regain its sense of direction following the political activism and social idealism of the 1960s, photographers embarked on a search to discover new subjects, methods and meanings. Color offered an obvious if indistinct way forward, a path leading beyond the void left by the 1960s and the era of the "concerned photographer" (as defined by Cornell Capa in 1968) toward some new as yet to be defined sense of purpose.

1970s color photography may thus be characterized as a chaotic and disparate search, a heterogeneous effort encompassing diverse bodies of work by artists as dissimilar as Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and others toward the rediscovery of something ennobling and purposeful in modern American life.-Kevin Moore, curator